Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on July 13, 2014 by Allahpundit

Until now, the politics of immigration have been seen as a no-lose proposition for President Obama and the Democrats. If they could get a comprehensive overhaul passed, they would win. And if Republicans blocked it, the GOP would further alienate crucial Hispanic and moderate voters.

But with the current crisis on the Southwest border, where authorities have apprehended tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children since October, that calculus may be shifting.

Republicans and even some Democrats have accused Obama of being insufficiently engaged in a calamity that many say he should have seen coming…

The emergency has also renewed questions about the administration’s competence, reminiscent of those raised during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, last year’s botched rollout of the health-care law and more recent revelations of mismanagement that jeopardized care of patients at veterans hospitals.

***

According to Brian Bennett’s intensely reported July 5 Los Angeles Times story, U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show that officers took fewer than 4,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into custody annually for most of the last decade. Then, in fiscal year 2012, officers seized 10,146 unaccompanied minors. Last fiscal year, they took 20,805; between last October and this June 15, they nabbed 39,133. The overused word “crisis” fits the numbers—indeed, “invasion” doesn’t seem too strong. By July 8, however, the White House had downgraded the invasion from a “crisis” to a “situation.”

Many Americans are deeply disturbed by the “situation.” They resent the expenditure of resources and the appropriation of facilities for the detention of the minors. They fear the public health consequences of their dispersion, with reports reliably indicating, despite attempts to suppress the information, the presence of tuberculosis and other unwelcome conditions among them. They also suspect that the president of the United States supports the situation.

Conditions have not suddenly changed in the minors’ home countries. So far as we can tell, the cartels and their customers have a sophisticated understanding of American immigration law (it prohibits the immediate deportation of minors “other than Mexican”) and how the White House enforces it (President Obama, as he made clear in a 2012 executive order regarding illegal minors, would prefer not to). As a Cleveland immigration attorney told Bennett, “The cartels have figured out where the hole is.”

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican whose state is housing 1,100 immigrant children at Fort Sill – just 100 shy of total capacity – said she’s still grasping at the scope of the problem and worried about the conditions the children now face.

“We had one case of chicken pox. We’ve had many cases of scabies and lice,” Fallin said.

She added that there’s been no guidance about how long the children will be housed, whether they’re entitled to any taxpayer-funded benefits, from education to Medicaid to foster care. And she’s unsure whether they might be “let loose in the United States” once they turn 18.

***

Illegal immigrants are being secretly flown to Massachusetts and kept in local lockups in an under-the-radar operation that has alarmed lawmen who are raising health and security concerns amid recent spikes in detainees coming up from Texas during the latest border crisis.

Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, said federal officials also wouldn’t answer questions about public school attendance by the children and the potential costs to taxpayers.

“Governors and mayors have the right to know when the federal government is transporting a large group of individuals, in this case illegal immigrants, into your state,” Mr. Heineman told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Saturday. “We need to know who they are, and so far, they are saying they’re not going to give us that information.”…

“There are concerns that this type of activity—placing children in locations across the country—is occurring throughout the United States, and information is not being shared appropriately with states,” the Republican Governors Association policy director, Marie Thomas Sanderson, wrote in an email to members on Friday and viewed by the Journal.

The pregnant minors have been moved into longer-term shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services in order to provide federally funded health care…

Under the 14th Amendment their children will be American citizens if they are born in the United States. It is unclear whether the mothers — and their children — will be deported. Wolfe did not respond to multiple requests for comment on that issue, and White House spokesman Josh Earnest did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.

HHS is trying to release the children to sponsors in the United States, but those sponsors aren’t always parents. “There have been cases of people who have attempted to be sponsors actually being identified as associated with trafficking organizations,” Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla) told National Review Online after visiting a housing facility at Fort Sill…

“If you can’t pay your coyote or your criminal organization, they will force you into slave labor or they will force you into prostitution,” the congressman said. And of the children who did make it to American custody, “a significant percentage of the children in these facilities have been abused, in one way or another, coming to the United States,” according to Bridenstine.

Sometimes fraud is remarkably obvious. Latham says any child that plans to attend Lynn Public Schools must make an appointment with the Parent Information Center and provide identification and residency information in order to be accepted and placed into one of the public schools.

In one instance, an unaccompanied alien minor brought a warrant for his arrest to the center and provided it to center officials.

“This situation just happens to be a magnitude unlike anything we have ever seen,” said Lauren Alder Reid, counsel for legislative and public affairs at the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the courts.

Immigration courts in the United States have long been troubled. The courts, overseen by the Department of Justice, have more than 375,000 cases being handled by just 243 judges, according to the agency…

“The system is so dysfunctional,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. “They get to stay, and the more time they spend here, the more difficult it is to get them removed.”

“So make no mistake about it — we have to keep on fighting as hard as we can on immigration,” Mrs. Obama said, to a cheering crowd, Breitbart reported. “And as my husband has said, he’s going to do whatever administrative action it takes to fix this broken system.”…

“We cannot afford to wait on Congress to lift up our next generation,” she said, Breitbart reported. “We can’t afford to wait on anybody when it comes to our kids’ future. Your grandparents and parents didn’t wait for opportunities to come to them. No, they packed up their families and moved to this country for a better life.”

***

Immigration from nearby countries — and, to some extent, all modern immigration — presents absorption problems that were not present with, say, European immigrants in the late 18th and early 19th century. To have a few unassimilated ethnic and linguistic minorities is normal in a large, modern country. But it is one thing to have a couple of Ukrainian churches in Philadelphia or a handful of German-speaking communities in Texas. It is another thing to have a socio-linguistic Berlin Wall or three running through practically every community in the country. Adjacency to Mexico, along with easier travel and communication, makes assimilating Mexican immigrants more difficult than assimilating the Irish generations ago. This is not at all helped by opportunistic political entrepreneurs such as La Raza and MEChA, which cultivate racial sentiment and separatism within Hispanic communities. Some parts of the country, such as my native West Texas, have long been Anglo-Hispanic cultural hybrids, and that can be a wonderful thing. It is not necessarily a good model for the country at large.

Blowback

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As I read those excerpts up top, if Obamugabe, the destroyer of this great land, is unimpeachable, then the other option is lead ventilation. What a disgusting POS he is. Using foreign children for craven political purposes. May he rot in Hell.

If the LEFT and everyone else who’s pushing for ‘more compassion’ for these children, and adults, from Central America really wanted to be compassionate toward them they’d suggest returning these individuals to their respective nations of origin and then cleaning up the slums there, building water treatment facilities, schools, hospitals, roads and bridges, and ending the corruption in the local authorities and governments.

This could be readily accomplished by focusing on the foreign aid that’s already being shoveled into those nations and providing intense and consistent oversight of the application of those funds.

Nation’s that resist these efforts, or have assisted in helping these individuals shatter American federal immigration law could be stripped of foreign aid and those funds could then be redirected to making the nations of origin of these children a decent and safe place to live.

Further, if we’re to show compassion for children growing up in slum conditions, in violent neighborhoods full of drug traffickers, we should be looking at our inner cities right here in the United States. We have areas that are every bit as bad as the nations these illegal aliens are leaving and we’ve failed to so much as attempt to address the needs of the children living and dying in those neighborhoods.

The majority of the MFM came from leftist journalism schools and are fellow travelers. They will only come out when there is enough blood in the water for a feeding frenzy as that indicates that what they are pushing is failing and then they must go after it so they aren’t stuck with a failure.

None of them want to draw that blood. They want this chaos. Their silence indicates this, and they haven’t figured out that it is suicide by silence that they are committing.

What happened to The Peace Corps? Aren’t they tasked with helping struggling developing nations and their people?

Obama said he was going to see that there was as civilian organization just as well armed and as strong as the United States military. His administration has been responsible for seeing that millions of rounds of hollow points and weapons have been bought and distributed to federal agencies… like the Agriculture Department, the Postal Service, and the Department of Education.

Send them down to Central America to straighten up the situation, eradicate the drug cartels stranglehold on local government and police and clean up the slums of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Hello, small rectangular box, wherein nothing is placed until I, like some demigod of small rectangular boxes, place within you what I might and what I can and what I would. And here the charade of my divinity lies immodestly bare, for I’ve a choice to make, whether I would populate this our world with reason, with insanity, with chaos. No true god can but choose to express the purity of his or her nature, but I, a child with a scepter, can choose, and in the choice prove myself a liar, a pretender that all the choices I discarded were not as much a part of me as the one I made.

Perhaps not. Perhaps in the choice, not in the possibilities, I define myself — though — why are the possibilities still there?

Be at ease, dear box. Your god is a lesser god who looks to a greater, and so you too, my creation, must look with me. Together, we stumble forward. Mayhaps the day will come when you too find yourselves gods of little rectangular boxes, and on that day, perhaps you too will become by choosing and be humbled that there was for you a choice.

“As long as (U.S.) immigration reform is not approved, the exodus of children to the United States will continue,” Jorge Ramon Hernandez, the senior representative of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, said at the talks.

This is unacceptable. We need to kick this guy’s butt and send his people home where they belong.NO amnesty, secure the border, send the illegals packing!

The majority of the MFM came from leftist journalism schools and are fellow travelers. They will only come out when there is enough blood in the water for a feeding frenzy as that indicates that what they are pushing is failing and then they must go after it so they aren’t stuck with a failure.

None of them want to draw that blood. They want this chaos. Their silence indicates this, and they haven’t figured out that it is suicide by silence that they are committing.

ajacksonian on July 13, 2014 at 8:20 PM

Another applicable quote:

“By refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word … They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: ‘But I didn’t mean this!’” — Ayn Rand

“There are concerns that this type of activity—placing children in locations across the country—is occurring throughout the United States, and information is not being shared appropriately with states,” the Republican Governors Association policy director, Marie Thomas Sanderson, wrote in an email to members on Friday and viewed by the Journal.

That’s because the lawless bunch of lumps in this administration haven’t got a clue how to handle this crisis, and don’t really care if it creates a hardship on the states.

So I was walking in the park today when all of a sudden about 10 unmarked vans/trucks come driving by and stop. It was just like a movie. I actually stopped and looked for a camera. They were DHS trucks (last truck had the logo).

Kind of creepy. All this for a baseball game. Remember when you could go to a ballgame without going through a metal detector or having being search your bags?

Obama is merely a symptom. The electorate will elect the next sack of crap in line after him. It’s all over but the crying. Too bad it had to happen in my lifetime. Cest la vie.

Judge_Dredd on July 13, 2014 at 8:12 PM

Certainly pulling all the worms out of our national woodwork is going to be very difficult; but that is not reason not to try. You are never truly defeated until you give up or have died. I do not recommend either of those two. There is real anger out there and growing fear. When these “migrants” with antibiotic resistant TB start being sent to our public school classrooms with domestic children who have no immunity, even your single mom who loves government handouts will start having second thoughts.

There was one thread that for whatever the reason kept going until it reached something like 118 pages. You had to be invited so troublemakers would be kept out but I guess it was mentioned too much on the regular threads and someone found it and caused a lot of trouble and it came to the notice of the moderators and they shut it down.

Be at ease, dear box. Your god is a lesser god who looks to a greater, and so you too, my creation, must look with me. Together, we stumble forward. Mayhaps the day will come when you too find yourselves gods of little rectangular boxes, and on that day, perhaps you too will become by choosing and be humbled that there was for you a choice.

Axe on July 13, 2014 at 8:30 PM

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

Kind of creepy. All this for a baseball game. Remember when you could go to a ballgame without going through a metal detector or having being search your bags?

gophergirl on July 13, 2014 at 8:39 PM

Remember when you could run through the airport to catch a plane the last minute (literally), and anybody could just walk up to the gate. Remmber that? No security checks, nothing except a lady there to take your ticket.

How do liberals sleep at night, knowing what they’ve done not only to this country but to the entire world through their blind support of this idiot in the White House? Sorry, but you have blood on your hands in every failure obama has contrived.

How many dead because of Fast and Furious?
How many dead because of his ROE in OEF?
How many dead in Syria and Iraq because of his support of terrorist rebels?
How many dead from his mismanagement of the VA?
How many dead in the Ukraine?
Egypt?
Libya?

The guy is a nightmare. No too long ago I’d of said there’s no way you could impeach him. Now the only just thing to do is seek an impeachment with the intent to prosecute to the full letter of the law and make him face some real jail time.

Remember when you could run through the airport to catch a plane the last minute (literally), and anybody could just walk up to the gate. Remmber that? No security checks, nothing except a lady there to take your ticket.

Federal immigration officials acknowledged Friday that they increased the number of charter flights this year carrying immigrant detainees to Massachusetts.

The flights, which started in April to Hanscom Field and Logan Airport, have been shrouded in secrecy. Federal and state officials have portrayed the flights as routine, but others say the flights seemed unusual in a state far from the Southern border.

How many dead because of Fast and Furious?
How many dead because of his ROE in OEF?
How many dead in Syria and Iraq because of his support of terrorist rebels?
How many dead from his mismanagement of the VA?
How many dead in the Ukraine?
Egypt?
Libya?

Remember when you could run through the airport to catch a plane the last minute (literally), and anybody could just walk up to the gate. Remmber that? No security checks, nothing except a lady there to take your ticket.

Fenris on July 13, 2014 at 8:55 PM

Yup, I’ve never been a frequent flyer, but I do remember when you could actually accompany friend or loved ones right up to the gate and wait with them right up until they bordered the flight. Hell, I put at least 3 girlfriends on flights while in college, and even had drinks with them less than 10 feet from the gate. (San Diego’s Lindberg Field used to have a bar right there at the gate) Now a days if you want to have a drink with a friend or loved one before they fly out, all of the bars are two full security levels away from the gates.

Remember when you could run through the airport to catch a plane the last minute (literally), and anybody could just walk up to the gate. Remmber that? No security checks, nothing except a lady there to take your ticket.

Fenris on July 13, 2014 at 8:55 PM

I remember my mom taking me to pick my dad up from the terminal, and getting to see him walk right out of the gate, if that’s what you mean.